Review: Susanna Phillips and Eric Owens present Schubert

If the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had an intimate performance space appropriate for art-song programs, such events might not be such a hard sell and we might more often hear concerts on the order of the wonderful all-Schubert song recital given by soprano Susanna Phillips and bass-baritone Eric Owens Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall.

That Sunday was Mother's Day conspired to keep attendance low for this final installment of the Symphony Center Presents Schubert Song series. Undaunted, the American singers seemed to welcome the opportunity to address their lieder to an appreciative band of song connoisseurs.

Phillips and Owens offered an attractive array of Schubert lieder, some familiar, others not. CSO members Daniel Gingrich, horn, and John Bruce Yeh, clarinet, played the obbligato parts in two extended song settings from the composer's final year. Myra Huang supplied the perceptive and altogether sensitive piano accompaniments.

Popular artists at Lyric Opera, Phillips and Owens will be much in evidence in Chicago in the near and distant future.

The Alabama-born soprano is to replace Dorothea Roeschmann as soloist in Strauss' "Four Last Songs" at this week's CSO subscription concerts. And Owens, a Philadelphia native heard most recently in Lyric's production of Dvorak's "Rusalka," recently was named one of Lyric Unlimited's community ambassadors. The company also has engaged him to sing his first Wotan in its new Wagner "Ring" cycle, to be unveiled in installments beginning in 2016-17.

It would have been nice to have the singers perform a Schubert duet, if only as an encore, at Sunday's concert. As it was, they stuck to separate groups of songs, each with its own attractions.

With her creamy timbre, seamless vocal compass, clear German diction and spontaneous ease of expression, Phillips cast herself as charming ingenue ("Die Manner sind mechant") and enraptured lover ("Bei dir allein") with equal success. The musical understanding she and Huang brought to the familiar "Gretchen am Spinnrade" was interesting: They began quite slowly, gathering speed and emotional intensity before reaching a shattering climax as the woeful heroine recalled the kiss of the faithless Faust.

Phillips segued convincingly from delight to pain in "Viola," a long and touching ballad about a young bride abandoned at the altar. No finer illustration of her vocal artistry was the way she drained her voice of color at the climax where the narrator declares that "the pain of love and longing has crushed the tender one."

The soprano ended with the popular "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" ("The Shepherd on the Rock"), the last of Schubert's more than 600 songs, composed a month before his death. Words and music took on touching immediacy in the freshness and nuance of Phillips' delivery, also the seamless musical dialog in which she and Yeh connected melting legato phrases in partnership with Huang's rippling pianism.

Gingrich's finely spun horn obbligato underscored the melancholy tragedy of "Auf dem Strom" ("On the River"), a seldom-heard setting of a Ludwig Rellstab poem about a disappointed lover who can only find fulfillment in death. As robustly appealing as was Owens' singing, this late Schubert lied proved less effective in this guise than when it's sung by a tenor, per Schubert's original intention.

The imposing bass-baritone came into his own in two groups of songs that included the well-known "An die Musik" and "Der Wanderer." The rock-solid, perfectly placed resonance Owens commands at the low end of his remarkably wide range impressed not only as sound but for what it told you about the deep understanding with which the singer turned music and poetry into exquisite miniatures of early German romanticism. He boomed magnificently as the defiant titan of "Prometheus" and in the hellishly violent tone-painting of "Gruppe aus dem Tartarus."

If Owens' Wotan commands the Civic Opera House stage half as well as he did Orchestra Hall's Armour Stage on Sunday, Lyric's "Ring" aficionados will be in Valhalla.